We celebrated Easter yesterday with lots of eating and sitting around, two things at which I could excel except that on most days I only have five minutes to shove a meal in my mouth before racing off to some activity. When I retire I plan to devote more time to eating and sitting around; it would be practically un-American not to. We also went to church and the minister told a funny (to me, anyway) story about receiving a promotional email from a company that will provide the equipment to enable people to fly during church Easter productions. The email said something like, "You know what's missing from your Easter production? Flying!" I'm a little bit upset that I've never received an email saying that that the one thing missing from my life is flying, because it's true. I already get 1,000 emails a day telling me that what's missing from my life is the perfect pair of ankle-cuff sandals or some new outdoor furniture, but not a word about flying. After the minister told the flying story he said some religious stuff, little of which I retained because the Boy distracted me with pictures of soldiers that he was drawing on the prayer request pamphlet in the pew. Since I left the pamphlet there, I hope someone finds it and decides that it's a prayer request for the military and not just random vandalism.
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kids. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2014
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Ten Workplace Skills I Learned Being a SAHM
Lately I've been thinking that I might need to get a job. Yes, I know what I'm doing now, raising kids, is a job. I'm talking about a job that pays in money instead of in grey hairs and happy memories and a job that requires you to leave the house without an entourage of small children. These thoughts began about the same time school ended two weeks ago; coincidentally, I'm sure. It was also around the time that we were all enjoying a summer evening, playing whiffle ball in the backyard. The Girl ran up to me, excitedly:
Girl: Mom, I can switch hit! Daddy says I'm a natural!
Me: That's great. I wish I could do that.
Girl: Why?
Me: I don't know. I think it sounds like a cool thing to be able to do.
Girl: Do you think it could help you with your sweeping?
It irks me that my kids don't think I am qualified to do anything but fetch snacks, wipe noses, go shopping, and clean. If you think I'm exaggerating, I have visual proof:
 |
| The kids in the Boy's pre-K class were asked what their mothers liked to do. Obviously, I love to vacuum! |
I have to admit that I do look happy in the picture. Of course, I'm also missing a nose, an arm, and feet, so accuracy isn't its strong point.
More recently, the Baby was asked all about me for Mother's Night at her school:
 |
| BTW, my eyes are actually blue. She might have noticed if I hadn't spent so much time at the grocery store and Target. I also totally wish that I could fly, especially in Atlanta traffic. |
Clearly, this is not an ideal time to think about reentering the workforce. No one is hiring lawyers who have just graduated from law school and actually know law-type stuff, so what chance does this give someone like me who hasn't practiced law in eight years? I'm pretty sure my experience as a room mom and frivolity blogger isn't going to do much to boost my credentials. The irony is that if I went back to work, I would be a far better employee now than I was before I had children because having kids has taught me so many skills that would be useful at a job. I've made a list...
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
At a Quad Junction (Formerly Known as a "Crossroads")
Yesterday, the Boy and I had the following conversation:
Boy: Mom, I want to have two world records.
Me: Mmm, okay.
Boy: First, I want to be the first Lebanese President of the United States.
Me: Okay, that's good. What's the second record?
Boy: I want to make a law to rename how roads come together. If two roads come together it's a double junction. If three roads come together it's a triple junction. If four roads come together it's a quad junction.
Me: You don't really have to pass a law to do that. You just have to get people to start using those names. Basically, you need a Twitter account and lots of followers.
I'm happy with those goals, especially considering his recent ambitions included being a supermarket bagger. I hope that it doesn't make me too much of a helicopter mom to admit that I had slightly higher aspirations for him than bagging groceries. I know I'm a snob. As for being the first "Lebanese" President, I didn't tell him that Thomas Jefferson beat him by nearly 300 years.
Boy: Mom, I want to have two world records.
Me: Mmm, okay.
Boy: First, I want to be the first Lebanese President of the United States.
Me: Okay, that's good. What's the second record?
Boy: I want to make a law to rename how roads come together. If two roads come together it's a double junction. If three roads come together it's a triple junction. If four roads come together it's a quad junction.
Me: You don't really have to pass a law to do that. You just have to get people to start using those names. Basically, you need a Twitter account and lots of followers.
I'm happy with those goals, especially considering his recent ambitions included being a supermarket bagger. I hope that it doesn't make me too much of a helicopter mom to admit that I had slightly higher aspirations for him than bagging groceries. I know I'm a snob. As for being the first "Lebanese" President, I didn't tell him that Thomas Jefferson beat him by nearly 300 years.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Get Out the Vote
The Girl has the most amazing teacher this year. She is young and energetic and fabulous in every way except one. Her birthday is tomorrow. My birthday was two days ago and Mom's birthday is Sunday. Later this month we have the Girl's birthday and the Baby's birthday. Makes you wonder what was in the water in February and March (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Shaking off my birthday fatigue, I put together a basket for her from the class:
Pretty cute if you're not into symmetry, which apparently I am not. If you'll notice there are handles on the sides of the bucket and the bow is way closer to one handle than the other. Also, the bow itself is a bit wonky. It's like I get *this* close to making something really good and then, wah, wah, wah, it's not to be. Also, I think you can see my legs reflected in the bucket. Although it looks like I am midway through some sort of Charleston move, I can assure you that I was not dancing while snapping the photo. It takes all my concentration to take a photo this bad. Despite the less than professional presentation, I hope that she enjoys the contents of the gift basket. Starbucks gift card (what's not to like about a pumpkin latte other than they are 320 calories a pop?), bag of Ghirardelli dark chocolate (my favorite), gift certificate to Jazmin Spa, and a gorgeous silk scarf that another student's mom picked up on a recent trip to China.
This week also marked the date of the class's learning celebrations (we aren't allowed to say "party" anymore) and guess who was in charge? That's right, yours truly. Instead of a blog, this really might just be a daily record of my nervous breakdown. If it gets too bad, I hope y'all will stage an intervention. The Girl's class has been studying American government so I decided we should have an election-themed learning celebration. Since they've been studying the difference between direct and representative democracy, we had a little mock election in which we voted once as you would in a direct democracy and once as a representative democracy. Mo Rocco did a similar exercise in a segment on Sunday Morning. (As an aside, did y'all know that former Sunday Morning anchor, Charles Kuralt had a secret family? It's always the ones you'd least suspect.)
Instead of voting for the actual candidates, which we thought would be too controversial, we opted to have the kids vote for their favorite candy between sour gummy bears and Skittles. First we had the kids vote and we counted up the total number of votes for each candy-date (ha, ha). It was looking good for team sour gummy bears, which led by a 2-1 margin. Then, they broke into tables and filled out ballots to vote again, as a table for their favorite. I made the ballots:
Each table selected an elector to announce the majority vote at the table. Again, the sour gummy bears took it, with four tables in camp sour gummy bear, versus only one table for Skittles. In the Sunday Morning clip it works out that the election results are different under the direct democratic vote then they are under the representative vote. Our results were the same, but I just explained that that's the way it usually works out in the United States. It would have been more illustrative if the results differed, but I wasn't about to gerrymander the tables to accomplish that.
As a reward for doing their civic duty, the kids got stickers:
And snacks:
Perhaps the milk chocolate and white chocolate dipped pretzels were a bad choice on my part. There were several comments that if you picked the white chocolate, you were for Romney and if you picked the milk, you were for Obama. Oh, kids! They do say the darndest things! They also, of course, got to eat the candy-dates, which made the election better than any one in which I've participated. I realize that makes me sound like a cannibal, which I am not. The "recipe" for the pretzels is really like microwave some chocolate chips and dip the pretzels in the chocolate and dip it in the sprinkles. Not much to it, but if you're paranoid that you'd screw it up somehow, here's the recipe. It's from the Lady Paula Deen and it doesn't even involve butter!
We finished up with an election-themed word search that I printed off some website as an afterthought:
If I were to do this again, I would have a couple of different voting choices. The entire activity took about 15 minutes (not including the snack) and it would have been nice to stretch it out a bit longer. So, maybe start with markers and colored pencils and then hit them with the candy as a bonus. I scoured the Internet and Pinterest for a lesson plan that had an interesting activity for the election and honestly, I didn't find anything that wouldn't have forced me to basically teach the students a class on election law. That wasn't happening, so this turned out to be a good compromise, a little bit didactic, a little bit fun. (Wasn't that a Donnie and Marie song?) Speaking of teaching and lesson plans, my friend Shannon has started a blog called Tags 4 Teachers to help teachers find lesson plans and activities. Check it out teachers and room mom-types! Have a great weekend and keep on keeping on brave New Yorkers and Jerseyites. We're thinking about you!
Pretty cute if you're not into symmetry, which apparently I am not. If you'll notice there are handles on the sides of the bucket and the bow is way closer to one handle than the other. Also, the bow itself is a bit wonky. It's like I get *this* close to making something really good and then, wah, wah, wah, it's not to be. Also, I think you can see my legs reflected in the bucket. Although it looks like I am midway through some sort of Charleston move, I can assure you that I was not dancing while snapping the photo. It takes all my concentration to take a photo this bad. Despite the less than professional presentation, I hope that she enjoys the contents of the gift basket. Starbucks gift card (what's not to like about a pumpkin latte other than they are 320 calories a pop?), bag of Ghirardelli dark chocolate (my favorite), gift certificate to Jazmin Spa, and a gorgeous silk scarf that another student's mom picked up on a recent trip to China.
This week also marked the date of the class's learning celebrations (we aren't allowed to say "party" anymore) and guess who was in charge? That's right, yours truly. Instead of a blog, this really might just be a daily record of my nervous breakdown. If it gets too bad, I hope y'all will stage an intervention. The Girl's class has been studying American government so I decided we should have an election-themed learning celebration. Since they've been studying the difference between direct and representative democracy, we had a little mock election in which we voted once as you would in a direct democracy and once as a representative democracy. Mo Rocco did a similar exercise in a segment on Sunday Morning. (As an aside, did y'all know that former Sunday Morning anchor, Charles Kuralt had a secret family? It's always the ones you'd least suspect.)
Instead of voting for the actual candidates, which we thought would be too controversial, we opted to have the kids vote for their favorite candy between sour gummy bears and Skittles. First we had the kids vote and we counted up the total number of votes for each candy-date (ha, ha). It was looking good for team sour gummy bears, which led by a 2-1 margin. Then, they broke into tables and filled out ballots to vote again, as a table for their favorite. I made the ballots:
Each table selected an elector to announce the majority vote at the table. Again, the sour gummy bears took it, with four tables in camp sour gummy bear, versus only one table for Skittles. In the Sunday Morning clip it works out that the election results are different under the direct democratic vote then they are under the representative vote. Our results were the same, but I just explained that that's the way it usually works out in the United States. It would have been more illustrative if the results differed, but I wasn't about to gerrymander the tables to accomplish that.
As a reward for doing their civic duty, the kids got stickers:
And snacks:
Perhaps the milk chocolate and white chocolate dipped pretzels were a bad choice on my part. There were several comments that if you picked the white chocolate, you were for Romney and if you picked the milk, you were for Obama. Oh, kids! They do say the darndest things! They also, of course, got to eat the candy-dates, which made the election better than any one in which I've participated. I realize that makes me sound like a cannibal, which I am not. The "recipe" for the pretzels is really like microwave some chocolate chips and dip the pretzels in the chocolate and dip it in the sprinkles. Not much to it, but if you're paranoid that you'd screw it up somehow, here's the recipe. It's from the Lady Paula Deen and it doesn't even involve butter!
We finished up with an election-themed word search that I printed off some website as an afterthought:
If I were to do this again, I would have a couple of different voting choices. The entire activity took about 15 minutes (not including the snack) and it would have been nice to stretch it out a bit longer. So, maybe start with markers and colored pencils and then hit them with the candy as a bonus. I scoured the Internet and Pinterest for a lesson plan that had an interesting activity for the election and honestly, I didn't find anything that wouldn't have forced me to basically teach the students a class on election law. That wasn't happening, so this turned out to be a good compromise, a little bit didactic, a little bit fun. (Wasn't that a Donnie and Marie song?) Speaking of teaching and lesson plans, my friend Shannon has started a blog called Tags 4 Teachers to help teachers find lesson plans and activities. Check it out teachers and room mom-types! Have a great weekend and keep on keeping on brave New Yorkers and Jerseyites. We're thinking about you!
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Halloween Fatigue!
So, before I start trying to cheer everyone up, because, let's face it, today totally sucked for a lot of people, I'm going to repeat something that Sister shared on Facebook. It's from one of New Jersey's greatest ambassadors, Bruce Springsteen:
Everything dies baby that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty,
and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
My thoughts and prayers are with so many of my friends and family who live in the areas hit by Hurricane Sandy.
Okay, are you all so ready for Halloween tomorrow? I am, and I tell you why. We can finally be finished with the do-a-fall-thing-everyday-insanity that I began on October 1st. Confession time: the last two days it's been really windy in the ATL and my fall-themed thing has been to keep fixing our Halloween decorations when they blow away. This brings up another reason that Halloween can't come fast enough: all of our decorations are all falling down, ripping, and rotting. I'll show you what we've got going on here:
Clearly, I need to call an exterminator for our spider problem. I already had to toss a pumpkin (the Baby's "favorite" naturally) because it was turning black and slimy. I realize that black and slimy is pretty on-target for the holiday, but even I have cleanliness standards. You see that orange banner above the door? Here's a better picture of it:
So, the K is 6 foot 3 and he basically garrotes himself when he walks into the porch. Garroting is also pretty spot-on for the holiday, but it's not very hospitable as a general matter. I keep shoving sticks in the mortar between the bricks and tacking the flags up that way, but they keep blowing down. Does anyone have a suggestion for me that doesn't involve the words "masonry bit?" See the Baby in the window? She was home with a cold today. More on that later. I should have prettied up the porch a little before I took the picture, but it was cold and windy today and it was all I could do to run out, snap my crappy pictures, and run back into the house.
Next up outside is the source of all those spider webs:
This guy got blown off his web shortly after the picture and is now lying eight-legs-up on our porch. I've officially given up on him until the wind dies down or November 1st rolls around, which ever comes first.
Inside, we have another infestation, rats (and possibly some possums):
These are from Martha Stewart's decorations line and I got them at Michael's. The kids keep moving them, which is why the two on the bottom are doing burpees or downward dog or something. Look at that big guy on the bottom step. Doesn't that one have to be a possum?
Rats are just the most vile creatures. I thought everyone felt the same way until a message came across one of my listservs. A woman posted that she found an injured rat and she wanted to contact an animal rescue group to help rehabilitate the little fellow. Shut the front door! Seriously?! I'm sorry, someone feeding a rat with an eyedropper so that he can one day return to scavenging garbage and spreading the plague seems like a wasted effort at best.
We also have bats:
which keep curling up and falling off the mirrors. They're from Martha, as well. My cleaning people are incredibly patient with the props, although they practically chortled when I reminded them that the next time they come, all the decorations will be down.
So there you go, my scary Halloween decor. I want it all gone, folks. I'm ready for Thanksgiving because it means no nylon spider webs blowing across the front yard and no more pumpkin banner strangling my house guests.
Remember how I told you that the Baby was home from school with a cold? So, since she wasn't really sick, she was up to all sorts of shenanigans. For instance, while I was working on the computer she kept coming up to me and poking me in the back. It felt kind of nice, to be honest, so she did it for like five minutes before it occurred to me to look at what she was actually doing. When I turned and looked at the back of my t-shirt, I saw this:
This is when I wish I were a better photographer. But, can you see it? The Baby was stamping all over the back of my shirt. Here's a close up:
If I don't miss my guess, that's an airplane, two speed limit signs, an ice cream sundae, some hearts, and an Easter egg. Sigh. I hope that Melissa & Doug aren't fooling when they say the ink is washable. Although, I suppose it's a good excuse to get some new workout clothes now that this one smells like sweat and negligent parenting. Happy Halloween everyone!
Everything dies baby that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty,
and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
Okay, are you all so ready for Halloween tomorrow? I am, and I tell you why. We can finally be finished with the do-a-fall-thing-everyday-insanity that I began on October 1st. Confession time: the last two days it's been really windy in the ATL and my fall-themed thing has been to keep fixing our Halloween decorations when they blow away. This brings up another reason that Halloween can't come fast enough: all of our decorations are all falling down, ripping, and rotting. I'll show you what we've got going on here:
Clearly, I need to call an exterminator for our spider problem. I already had to toss a pumpkin (the Baby's "favorite" naturally) because it was turning black and slimy. I realize that black and slimy is pretty on-target for the holiday, but even I have cleanliness standards. You see that orange banner above the door? Here's a better picture of it:
So, the K is 6 foot 3 and he basically garrotes himself when he walks into the porch. Garroting is also pretty spot-on for the holiday, but it's not very hospitable as a general matter. I keep shoving sticks in the mortar between the bricks and tacking the flags up that way, but they keep blowing down. Does anyone have a suggestion for me that doesn't involve the words "masonry bit?" See the Baby in the window? She was home with a cold today. More on that later. I should have prettied up the porch a little before I took the picture, but it was cold and windy today and it was all I could do to run out, snap my crappy pictures, and run back into the house.
Next up outside is the source of all those spider webs:
This guy got blown off his web shortly after the picture and is now lying eight-legs-up on our porch. I've officially given up on him until the wind dies down or November 1st rolls around, which ever comes first.
Inside, we have another infestation, rats (and possibly some possums):
These are from Martha Stewart's decorations line and I got them at Michael's. The kids keep moving them, which is why the two on the bottom are doing burpees or downward dog or something. Look at that big guy on the bottom step. Doesn't that one have to be a possum?
Rats are just the most vile creatures. I thought everyone felt the same way until a message came across one of my listservs. A woman posted that she found an injured rat and she wanted to contact an animal rescue group to help rehabilitate the little fellow. Shut the front door! Seriously?! I'm sorry, someone feeding a rat with an eyedropper so that he can one day return to scavenging garbage and spreading the plague seems like a wasted effort at best.
We also have bats:
which keep curling up and falling off the mirrors. They're from Martha, as well. My cleaning people are incredibly patient with the props, although they practically chortled when I reminded them that the next time they come, all the decorations will be down.
So there you go, my scary Halloween decor. I want it all gone, folks. I'm ready for Thanksgiving because it means no nylon spider webs blowing across the front yard and no more pumpkin banner strangling my house guests.
Remember how I told you that the Baby was home from school with a cold? So, since she wasn't really sick, she was up to all sorts of shenanigans. For instance, while I was working on the computer she kept coming up to me and poking me in the back. It felt kind of nice, to be honest, so she did it for like five minutes before it occurred to me to look at what she was actually doing. When I turned and looked at the back of my t-shirt, I saw this:
This is when I wish I were a better photographer. But, can you see it? The Baby was stamping all over the back of my shirt. Here's a close up:
If I don't miss my guess, that's an airplane, two speed limit signs, an ice cream sundae, some hearts, and an Easter egg. Sigh. I hope that Melissa & Doug aren't fooling when they say the ink is washable. Although, I suppose it's a good excuse to get some new workout clothes now that this one smells like sweat and negligent parenting. Happy Halloween everyone!
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